IMOU BULLET 3 3MP (2.8 MM) - PoE IP CAMERA

One cable instead of two: PoE at entry-level camera money

The Bullet 3 takes power and returns video over a single UTP run using standard PoE 802.3af, drawing about 6 W while it does so. Translated into system planning, that means eight of these cameras fit on an ordinary eight-port PoE switch with a 60-65 W budget, with headroom left for the brief current spikes when the illuminator kicks in. Comparable Ajax and Reolink models in this catalogue ask for 7 to 12 W each, so the same switch runs out after six or seven cameras — and you discover that exactly when you want to add one more. If there is no PoE switch at all, the camera also runs from a plain 12 V / 1 A adapter, so it can be mounted next to an existing socket without rebuilding the network. One ceiling is worth knowing in advance: the network port is 100 Mbit/s, which is generous for a 3 MP H.265 stream but slow if you ever need to pull several days of archive off the camera over the wire.

Colour at night out to 30 metres — and the price you pay for it

This model belongs to the Imou family with Smart Color Night Vision: instead of dropping into black-and-white infrared after dark, it lights the scene with visible light and keeps a colour image out to about 30 metres. The difference shows up the moment you review footage — a monochrome frame gives you a silhouette in a jacket and a dark car, a colour frame gives you a blue jacket and a grey estate, and those are the details that matter when the recording has to be shown to somebody else. What you pay for it is visibility: the light on the facade is obvious from the street, in summer it gathers moths right in front of the lens, and if the camera faces a neighbour's windows the night-time glow becomes a conversation you did not plan to have. Colour night vision therefore makes sense over a driveway, a porch or a garage door, while a discreet watch on the far corner of a plot is better served by pure infrared — the Reolink P324 in this same catalogue, for instance. One more thing the spec sheets gloss over: those 30 metres are the range at which the camera reliably sees movement, not the range at which a face can be identified, which with a 2.8 mm lens and a 3 MP sensor runs out at roughly six to eight metres.

3 megapixels, a 96° angle and 25 fps: what actually fits in frame

The 1/3-inch sensor produces 2304×1296 pixels at 25 frames per second, roughly a third more detail than the very common 2 MP 1920×1080 cameras while generating about half the data of a 5 MP model, so the archive grows more slowly. A 96° horizontal and 111° diagonal field of view means that from three metres up, one camera covers a yard nine or ten metres wide, or takes in an entrance together with the approach to it. Twenty-five frames per second is the rate at which somebody walking briskly two metres from the lens stays a person rather than a smear, so frame-by-frame review yields usable stills. For planning purposes that means a general view of a yard, a small shop floor or a corridor is well covered, while reading number plates at twenty metres is not this camera's job — that calls for a narrower 4-6 mm lens on a dedicated camera at the gate.

IMOU SENSE: the camera itself tells a person from a vehicle

The analytics run inside the camera, so an alert is not triggered by any change in pixels but only after the algorithm has classified the object as a human or a vehicle. You feel the difference within the first week: a camera without that filter finds dozens of events per night in swaying branches and cloud shadows, and sooner or later the owner simply mutes notifications, at which point the system stops protecting anything. The Imou Life app lets you draw detection zones on top of that — exclude the road behind the fence so passers-by stop lighting up your phone, and keep the reaction limited to the strip between the gate and the door. Alerts arrive by push and e-mail, and each event is tagged in the archive, so finding the right fragment later takes seconds instead of scrubbing through hours of footage. An honest limitation: there is no separate animal category in this model, so a large dog running around the yard will still raise the occasional alert, and the only cure is careful zoning and sensitivity tuning.

Storage: a 512 GB card, a recorder, or the cloud

The camera accepts microSD cards up to 512 GB — twice the usual budget-segment ceiling of 256 GB — which in H.265 covers roughly a month of continuous recording, or several months if you record events only. The second route is a recorder: ONVIF support means the camera is not locked to the Imou NVR-N118-8A0E and works just as well with a third-party unit such as the Dahua DHI-NVR1104HS-P-S3/H, which already has four PoE ports and removes the need for a separate switch. If you do go with the Imou recorder, note that it has no PoE ports of its own, so a PoE switch has to stay in the budget — that is where first-time calculations usually go wrong. There is also Home Assistant integration and Imou's subscription cloud, and the cloud earns its keep in exactly one scenario: where the camera could be taken down along with its card, because the local archive disappears with it.

Where this camera belongs, and where it does not

The natural jobs for the Bullet 3 are the entrance of a house, a garage door, a yard up to ten metres across, a small shop floor, a storeroom or an office corridor — places where a cable already runs or can be pulled without drama. The elongated body also works as a deterrent in its own right: a bullet camera on a bracket is visible from a distance, and a fair share of opportunistic attempts end at the moment somebody notices it. For a shop or a small warehouse the appeal is arithmetic: you can cover four or five positions instead of two pricier cameras, and then put a single 5-8 MP model exactly where detail matters, at the till or by the safe. It is out of place in two situations: when number plates have to be read at the gate from more than fifteen metres, and when there is physically nowhere to run a cable — a far fence, an outbuilding, a summer house with no power. The plastic body weighs 220 grams, carries an IP67 rating and works from -30 to +60 °C, so it survives both wind-driven rain on an open facade and a January frost that keeps cheaper -10 °C cameras from restarting after a power cut, while the RJ-45 pigtail always belongs inside a junction box — the universal Ajax JunctionBox in this catalogue costs less.

How it differs from its neighbours in this catalogue

Its closest relative is the Imou PS8D 3MP PoE: same resolution, same PoE, but a dome body and, per its spec sheet, no human or vehicle recognition — so the extra buys you fewer features, and it is worth taking only when a low-profile ceiling dome is what you specifically need. The Imou Bullet 3MP is essentially this camera with Wi-Fi added, and the premium pays off when a cable run is awkward, though an outdoor Wi-Fi camera always depends on signal through a wall while a wired link simply works. The Imou 3MP PoE PT adds a pan-and-tilt head, which is the right answer when one position has to watch several directions — a junction of paths in a yard, say — and doubling the price only makes sense with that geometry. The Reolink P324 is a genuine step up: 5 MP, a metal body, 24 months of warranty instead of 12 and clean infrared instead of visible light, so take it when you want detail and a night watch nobody notices rather than colour footage. The Imou Floodlight Cam looks tempting because of the floodlight, but it is a 2 MP camera without AI detection, which is not what you want as the main camera on a yard. In short: the Bullet 3 is the cheapest way to get a wired outdoor camera with AI detection and colour night vision, which is why it is used to cover the perimeter while the pricier models are placed only where identification is required.

Tell us how many positions you need to cover and whether cable can be pulled, and we will work out how many of these cameras are enough and where the system needs something more detailed.